Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Meal Station Legend: Grandma Munra

“At Meacham, in the midst of the Blue mountains is nestled an
attraction that appeals to every traveler. It is a unique mountain station,
known the land over for its excellent meals and home-like conditions. It is a
large elegantly built log structure and is presided over by a dear old lady
known as ‘Grandma Munra.’” —Salem Daily
Capital Journal, September 10, 1896

“Grandma
Munra” was Katherine Sara Sterrett, who was born in Erie City, Pennsylvania, in
1830. She married John R. McCarter in 1850, and over the next three decades she
ran boarding houses in Pennsylvania and in southern California. At some point
she re-married, to Knight S. Munra, and the couple came to Oregon where she did catering and operated dining rooms at the St. Charles and another hotel in Eugene in the
1880s.

About
1886, Henry S. Rowe, general superintendent of the Oregon Railroad &
Navigation Company, brought Katherine and her husband to Bonneville, Oregon, to
run the company’s new eating house. The Bonneville dining room, less than forty
miles east of Portland, served mostly railroad workers when it opened, but its
popular proprietor soon made it known throughout the Columbia River Gorge.

In
the early 1890s Mrs. Munra operated a hotel in Junction City and was then in
charge of the boarding halls at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Her fame grew
again when the Union Pacific Railroad put her in charge of a new dining station
called the Log Cabin about 1894. This rustic structure was located in the
remote and chilly Blue Mountain town of Meacham (elevation 3,670 feet; record
low temperature, -52 degrees), where Grandma Munra served railroad passengers
as well as railroad workers, offering a “wonderful bill of fare of home-made
bread, preserves and pastry” accompanied by “dainty linen and gleaming silver.”

Salem Daily Journal, Nov. 21,1902

The Meacham
eating house continued even after the introduction of a dining car on the
railroad’s premier passenger trains. Katherine Munra's name was legend along the Union
Pacific rails; “Every summer the company gave me a vacation. They furnished me
an annual pass and treated me perfectly lovely.” But the Log Cabin burned to the
ground in November of 1902 and was not replaced; dining cars were
becoming standard railroad equipment. Grandma Munra returned to the Gorge, where in 1903
she took charge of the dining room of the new Hood River Country Club Inn.
Despite her age, Mrs. Munra was managing the tea room of the Portland YWCA in
1904.

Perhaps
more hostess and mother figure than cook, Mrs. Munra was nevertheless
particularly noted for her pies and cakes. In an article in the Portland Oregon Journal in 1911, she provided the
recipe for a cake that she attributed to Martha Washington; in a 1923 interview
with Fred Lockley of the Journal, she
says, “Some day when I have time I will give some of my recipes for cakes. My
friends tell me they like my cakes pretty well.”

Munra
Point and Munra Falls in the Columbia River Gorge were named for Grandma Munra in 1915.
Katherine Sara Sterrett Munra died in Portland June 29, 1923, and is buried in
Lone Fir Cemetery.

Martha Washington’s Cake

Grandma Munra said she
obtained this recipe in St. Louis in 1869 from a Mrs. Stephen Gardener, who got
it from her mother, who was a neighbor of the Washingtons at Mount Vernon and
who had “been instructed in the making of the cake by Martha Washington
herself.”

Take
1 and ¼ pounds of white sugar, 1
and ⅛ pounds of butter, 2 pounds
of flour and 1 pint of sour milk, 6 eggs, a teaspoon of soda in the sour milk,
the grated rind of 2 lemons and the juice of one, one nutmeg, a pinch of mace,
1 pound of stoned raisins, 1 pound of currants and 1 and ½ pounds of citron.

Whip
the butter and sugar to a cream. To which add the yolks of the eggs well
beaten, then stir in the milk and the flour alternately, followed by the whites
of the eggs beaten to a froth. Have the fruit well floured and stir in last.
Cover with a buttered paper to keep from browning too rapidly and bake for 2
and ½ hours.

Passengers on the train between Portland and the
Cascade Mountains are often interested in the sight of a sweet-faced old lady
with soft white hair and bright brown eyes, to whom every official on the road
pays court, from the boy who sells "apples ‘n bananas" to the superintendent.
And the inquiring tourist is always given the ready information, “Why, that’s
Grandma Munra, who used to have the place at Meacham, she’s about the most
popular woman in Oregon, I guess.”

Thanks, Jeff! I'm very interested if you have any additional information on Katherine Munra, especially about food. She's definitely a "person of influence" in the story of what we ate in the Pacific Northwest.

About Me

Richard H. Engeman heads Oregon Rediviva, LLC, a public history research and writing firm. He is the author of "The Oregon Companion" and "Eating It Up in Eden." See his website at www.oregonrediviva.com.